2022’s dance music golden boy Fred Again has posted a couple of TikToks sharing how and why he crafted his new single ‘Danielle (smile on my face), a single off his upcoming album ‘After Life 3’.
In the first video, posted yesterday, he says that the tune “represents a really important part of AL3”.
The song samples 070 Shake’s ‘Nice to Have’, which Fred says he ‘“literally listened to everrryyyy day last year… everrryyyywhere ALL the time.”
The British artist, and the man behind the most viewed Boiler Room set of all time, also said that the song acts as a safe place where he can just hide from everything for a few minutes at a time - something that fans have told Fred about his music.
Following up that video with another TikTok this morning, Fred shares the deeper, personal meaning behind ‘Danielle’ with his followers.
“As soon as I heard Danielle [070 Shake] say ‘fuck what they say I’m safe in your arms and if I die in your arms there’d be a smile on my face’, it resonated with me to my absolute core about a time when it became very easy, like almost the most comfortable option, to find solace or even purposseee [sic] within a deeply toxic and lonely thing," he said to start the video.
“For me, the feeling is really tragic and painfully tbh,” he continued.
“It’s sorta closing off close friends, and people trying to help you, and real life, like an addict doing anything it takes to protect that one thing.”
He starts and ends the video with a disclaimer that he believes “the beautiful thing about music is it’s totally up to each individual person to decide [the meaning behind a song].”
Opening up like this and sharing the thought process behind tunes isn’t something that every artist does, nor should it be expected. The fact that Fred does it openly, constantly sharing and interacting with his fanbase - combined with his surpreme talent - makes him a unique and easy-to-like artist.
His next album ‘After Life 3 (January 1 - September 9 2022)’ comes out on October 28th, just in time to soundtrack the Kiwi summer.
